Bar codes have made it to the bedside at Tri-City Medical Center, where most nurses are now using hand-held scanners to make sure each patient gets the correct medication at the proper time and dose.

Nurses in all of the Oceanside hospital's inpatient departments ---- those areas where patients stay overnight ---- are now required to use the small wireless readers to scan each medication container before administering its contents to a patient. Tri-City officials said the $1.2 million project, which was largely funded by the Tri-City Hospital Foundation and auxiliary, has been proven to reduce medical dosing errors by 80 percent.

According to Steve Hori, an information technology analyst at Tri-City, the bedside system is used in relatively few hospitals in San Diego County. So far, only Tri-City, the veterans hospital in San Diego and the UCSD Medical Center have it.

Hospitals have struggled with medication delivery problems since doctors first started scratching out prescriptions.

A 2006 study by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies found that improper medicine was the most common error, affecting 1.5 million people in the United States each year.

In the 1990s, hospitals turned to automation to help reduce dispensary errors. Today, most modern hospitals use computers to access a patient's prescription record and automatically pop open a drawer with the correct medications. Tri-City's new system, which went into use at the end of June, takes the process one step further, with nurses scanning each container before handing them over to a patient.

Hori said that when the scan occurs, computers check not only that the medication is correct, but also that the amount, and the time of administering the dose, are correct.

"If something does not match up, it will let the nurse know immediately," he said.

The most recent high-profile medication mix-up occurred in 2008 when the newborn twins of actor Dennis Quaid were inadvertently given too-strong a dose of heparin, a medication used to prevent blood clotting. The dose, which contained 10,000 parts per 1 million of the drug instead of 10 parts per 1 million, caused severe bleeding in the infants.

Cedars-Sinai the hospital where the incident occurred, later released a statement that said hospital technicians accidentally placed the wrong doses when restocking an automatic dispensing system.

Hori said scanning at the bedside would have found the error and prevented giving the wrong dose.

"We don't want that kind of thing to happen here," he said.

Up in Tri-City's intensive care unit, registered nurse Anna Duenas uses the new scanning system daily. She said she appreciates the convenience of the new system, because the computer logs each drug she enters without her having to leave a patient's room and enter in information into a computer manually.

An added benefit: The new system provides confirmation for patients who might not remember getting their medications.

"Sometimes if a patient feels maybe they didn't get their medications, you have the record right there, and you can show them that they did get it," she said. "It's a backup both ways."

Call staff writer Paul Sisson at 760-901-4087 or psisson@nctimes.com.